Chapter 161. The Jewish Question as Heisman Presents It: Judaism as Sociobiological Technology, Chosenness and Survival

Judaism is the hinge of Mitchell Heisman’s suicide note. In his scheme it is the first “technology” to override biology, the matrix from which Christianity, liberalism and Marxism developed, and the forerunner of the technological Singularity. Heisman calls it a “meta-sociobiological technology”, built to manage human inclinations and to keep a fractious people together [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, study guide section 11]. This chapter sets out his analysis in his own terms, including its most contested theses: that Jewish survival has depended on persecution, a speculation about the genetics of Jewish intelligence, a contrast between Zionism and Nazi eugenics, and an “Anglo-Jewish convergence” in America. These are presented as the author’s hypotheses, with the evidence he cites. They are then placed beside the library’s historical scholarship on how Jewish belief formed, especially the debated Iranian contribution.

The Map of the Argument

Heisman’s discussion of Judaism is spread across Part I of “God is Technology” and returns in Part II [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, TOC]:

Judaism as a Technology of Behaviour

Heisman’s starting point is comparative. “Of the major religions, Confucianism might be the closest analog to early Judaism”. This is not only because Confucius’s golden rule (Analects 15:23) is “virtually identical to Hillel’s”, but because “Judaism and Confucianism both emphasize ancestral wisdom as a guide for living in this world. They both emphasize behavior more than belief” [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, passage “PART II (part 80)”]. On his reading the Ten Commandments target endemic social problems such as murder, adultery, theft and envy. They do not demand radical altruism. Instead they moderate biological extremes toward a golden mean, managing the Yetzer ha-ra, which he likens to Freud’s id, and channelling it to constructive ends. He asks whether Jesus’s extreme altruism was a pathological bending of those designed constraints [ibid., study guide section 11]. The reference shelf gives the traditional doctrine for comparison. In rabbinic Judaism the yetzer hara “is not a demonic force” but a natural part of creation, the misuse of what the body needs (food becoming gluttony, procreation becoming promiscuity). It is balanced by a yetzer hatov, and “Everything is determined by heaven, except one’s fear of heaven” [Wikipedia: Yetzer hara].

He extends the technological metaphor to economics. The “economy of good and evil” is the biblical economisation of the Egyptian political hierarchy, with the pyramid inverted so that slaves rank at the top. Cheshbon hanefesh, the “accounting of the soul”, makes Judaism a form of “spiritual capitalism” in which mitzvot are accumulated like profit, a system that Jesus later overthrew [ibid., study guide sections 17 and 39]. Jewish survival over three thousand years is, for Heisman, “empirical proof that civilization-memes … can overcome genetic limitations” [ibid., section 17].

Korakh, Chosenness and ‘Sanctified Inconsistency’

The “kinship paradox” is central to the treatise: Jews, Heisman argues, are internally divisive (“Two Jews, Three Opinions, Four Factions”), so they could not hold together by kinship alone and needed extra-biological law [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, study guide section 12]. Korakh’s rebellion (Numbers 16) shows the resulting tension. “In front of a large crowd, Korakh rebuked: For all the community are holy, all of them, and the Lord is in their midst”, which challenges Moses’s claim to superior authority [ibid., “Korakh’s Rebellion”, p.150]. The narrative resolves the challenge when “the earth opened its mouth and swallowed them up”. Heisman comments: “Problem solved. This is yet another case where metaphorical belief in the supernatural…” [ibid., pp.150-151]. His conclusion is that “Moses attempted to induce Jews to be selectively inconsistent in their holy egalitarianism”. Jews must accept “sanctified inconsistencies” (the authority of Moses, a priestly caste, patriarchy, chosen-people status) or their egalitarianism would destroy itself [ibid., study guide section 13]. The reference article on chosenness gives the biblical basis that Heisman reworks. “Chosen people” is a rabbinic term. The biblical terms are ʿam segullah (“treasure people”) and goy kadosh (“holy people”, Exodus 19:6), and Deuteronomy 7:6 states “the LORD thy God hath chosen thee to be His own treasure, out of all peoples” [Wikipedia: Jews as the chosen people].

Disaster is Success, Success is Disaster

Heisman’s most contested sociological thesis is that persecution has helped preserve Jews as a group. “This view is corroborated by the secular founder of political Zionism, Theodor Herzl. The ‘propelling force in the creation of a Jewish state’, he thought, was antisemetic enmity… ‘our enemies have made us one…It is only pressure that forces us back to the parent stem'” [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, “Disaster is Success”, p.162ff.]. Heisman concludes that “Jews survived their kinship paradox, in part, through a moral mechanism that capitalizes on persecution and oppression as a source of collective unity”, and that “The threat of near extinction is the extreme particularism that is the genesis-root of Jewish universalism” [ibid., pp.163-164]. Mosaic law’s formula for internal peace became, in Isaiah, swords beaten into plowshares, and was then “universalized, and then secularized, into a program for world peace” [ibid., pp.164-165].

“Success is Disaster” turns the argument round. “With Zionism Jews are victims once again, only this time they are victims of their own success.” A Jewish morality that favours the weaker gives displaced Palestinians “more moral voice than any other people in a comparable situation”, and “Being Goliath is a problem when the moral of the story is that David ultimately wins” [ibid., “Success is Disaster”, pp.165-166]. Here appears the formula that recurs across the book: “radical moral integrity through rational moral self-consistency leads to rational self-destruction” [ibid., p.166]. Heisman sets the two poles against each other. “The (Zionist) cause of Jewish genetic self-preservation leads to the corruption of Jewish ethical-memes while (Marxist) Jewish egalitarian memes can only most fully realize themselves at the expense of genetic self-preservation as a group, i.e. intermarriage” [ibid., p.167]. He ends the movement with: “Ultimate success, however, is to be found in total self-destruction as biological being in the Singularity” [ibid., p.168]. More generally, he presents Judaism’s paradox of transcending biology while perpetuating it as the seed of liberal democracy, and Israel-Palestine as its unresolved case on the human plane [ibid., study guide section 9].

Egalitarian Memes, Eugenics and Intelligence

In “All Ideas Are Not Created Equal” Heisman argues that “Jewish ethical-egalitarian memes, taken to their logical extreme, lead to biological irrationalism and genetic suicide. Total altruism, for example, would amount to rational biological self-destruction” [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, passage “part 25”]. He contrasts this with Nazism as a “maximal political-biological strategy” of eugenic self-control. He calls Zionism a constrained nationalism seeking secure territorial existence rather than world domination, and identifies the deepest Jewish-Nazi contrast as the Jewish refusal to sterilise their own people or practise artificial selection, grounded in the valuation of every individual life [ibid., study guide section 18].

He offers, explicitly as speculation, a biological hypothesis: “As an educated guess, I would posit that the path to Judaism originated with a genetic mutation among Semitic populations that resulted in an intelligence advantage. Too much can be made of sheer IQ to the exclusion of other moral and behavioral characteristics of Jews, but an original intelligence advantage can help explain the evolutionary path that led to other more distinctive Jewish behaviors” [ibid., passage “part 33”]. He cites The Bell Curve on Ashkenazi test scores and Adin Steinsaltz on the Jewish elevation of the talmidei hakhamin [ibid., study guide section 19]. He also notes, as part of his “freedom of speech” theme, that four of “the most prominent critics of sociobiology” whom he names are “of Jewish origin”, and adds: “The laws of Moses are not in Jewish genes, they are in the Torah” [ibid., “Beyond Nurture and Nature”, pp.131-132].

Marx, Schoenberg and Wagner: ‘Typical Jewish Un-Jewishness’

In “Absolute Purity” Heisman returns to the theme through modern figures. “Typical Jewish Un-Jewishness” (p.538) is about Marx, not Wagner. Heisman argues that “Left-wing humanist-universalists of Jewish origin such as Marx were alienated from both their own Jewish roots and gentile roots”. Because Marx was baptised as a child, “his Jewishness was confined more distinctly and decisively to its hereditary aspect”, and “Marxism is what happened when Christianity became reconnected with its Jewish radical-roots” [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, “Typical Jewish Un-Jewishness”, pp.539-540]. He quotes Hitler’s statement of 19 October 1941 that “Christianity is a prototype of Bolshevism: the mobilisation by the Jew of the masses of slaves with the object of undermining society” as the Nazi form of that equation [ibid., p.540]. “Judaism in Music” (p.544), whose title echoes Wagner’s antisemitic essay, contrasts Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk, which “Nazi totalitarianism” applied “to the German nation”, with Schoenberg’s twelve-tone method, in which “all tones are created equal”. Heisman calls Schoenberg’s method “a kind of musical Marxism” and an expression of the “evolution towards an egalitarian end” that he takes to characterise “the Jewish mind” [ibid., “Judaism in Music”, pp.544-546]. Yuri Slezkine’s history of the Bolshevik elite gives a mainstream historian’s version of the religious reading of revolution. Slezkine identifies the Bolsheviks as “millenarian sectarians preparing for the apocalypse”, “an exclusive millenarian sect” that grew into a church. His biographies include men like Karl Sobelson (Radek), who passed from Galician-Jewish cosmopolitanism through Polish patriotism to socialism [Slezkine, The House of Government, #70745, parts I-II].

The Anglo-Jewish Convergence

In Part II Heisman argues that the Anglo-Saxon experience of conquest by the Normans in 1066 produced a Puritan ethos that converged with Judaism. Adapting to the “Norman Yoke” cultivated “virtues of the broken heart”. The Puritans, by radicalising the Bible’s roots against a Norman-papal Christianity, took a path “resembl[ing] Jewish tradition” [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, study guide section 87]. The two traditions share a preference for abstract moral principle over manners and custom [ibid., section 88]. Heisman cites an observation that the American mind was “ready to think Jewishly” because of the Bible’s deep influence. He argues that although Jews are about 2 per cent of the population, Americans are culturally “half-Jews”, and he quotes John Jay Chapman (1897): “we are all adopted in Judah”. As emblems he points to John Adams’s 1776 proposal for the Great Seal, which joined the children of Israel to the Saxon chiefs Hengist and Horsa, and to America as a “cathedral of commerce”, Christian outside and Jewish inside [ibid., section 89].

Historical Context: How Jewish Eschatology Formed

Heisman’s “Exodus paradigm” makes the move from slavery to messianic triumph the origin of directional history. The library’s historians of religion ask where the later Jewish ideas of resurrection, angels and demons, and a final restoration came from. George William Carter argues that “In the Persian period of Jewish writings a belief in immortality has for the first time taken definite form”. He quotes the Avestan hope for “the victorious Saoshyant and his helpers, when he shall restore the world, which will thenceforth never grow old and never die”, and concludes: “To this foreign contact, therefore, we probably are indebted for some of the loftiest and most spiritual conceptions, which came into Judaism and passed from Judaism into Christianity” [Carter, Zoroastrianism and Judaism, #55114, chs. on resurrection and eschatology]. Werner Sundermann tests one case, the demon Asmodaios of the Book of Tobit. He reports that Isidor Scheftelowitz rejected an Iranian origin on phonological grounds. Sundermann himself concludes, from the names Aēšmō daēuuō and Asmodaios and their shared role as “enemies of marital union”, that “the assumption of an Iranian origin of the Jewish demon Asmodaios is correct” [Sundermann, Zoroastrian Motifs in Non-Zoroastrian Traditions, #55067]. Heisman locates the novelty of Judaism in the Exodus and Mosaic law. Carter and Sundermann give a documented, though disputed, account in which parts of its eschatology came from Iran.

Key points

• Heisman treats Judaism as a “meta-sociobiological technology” that, like Confucianism, emphasises behaviour and ancestral wisdom over belief, and manages the Yetzer ha-ra toward a golden mean.
• Korakh’s rebellion (Numbers 16) illustrates his “kinship paradox” and the “sanctified inconsistencies” (Moses’s authority, priesthood, chosenness) that he says Jewish egalitarianism needs in order to survive.
• Citing Herzl (“our enemies have made us one”), he argues that persecution unified Jews (“Disaster is Success”) and that political success undermines the original balance of genes and memes (“Success is Disaster”).
• He contrasts Jewish egalitarian memes, which he says lead to “genetic suicide” if maximised, with Nazi eugenics, and calls Zionism a constrained nationalism.
• He offers as an “educated guess” a genetic mutation conferring an intelligence advantage, with his own caveat that IQ alone does not explain Jewish behaviour.
• “Typical Jewish Un-Jewishness” reads Marx as Christianity reconnected to its Jewish roots, and “Judaism in Music” sets Schoenberg’s tonal egalitarianism against Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk.
• Part II’s “Anglo-Jewish Convergence” presents Puritan America as culturally “half-Jewish”.
• Carter (Persian sources of resurrection and the Saoshyant) and Sundermann (Asmodaios/Aēšma, against Scheftelowitz) give the scholarly context of Iranian influence on Jewish eschatology. Slezkine gives a historian’s reading of Bolshevism as a millenarian sect.